She is sitting there in her favorite chair. She’s smoking, taking in deep drags of smoke into her lungs. It’s May and the weather has turned beautifully warm, like summer. My mother takes long drags again on her cigarette. She is rarely without one in her hand. My great aunt is dying upstairs and my mom is upset. I am seventeen and it’s my graduation coming up.
“Martha, are you going to the party or not?” My mom asks me from the chair in the living room.
“I don’t know mom.” I tell her.
I go outside to the patio and stretch out on the chaise lounge trying to tan my ugly white legs.
“Ok God” I say, “need your help here. I don’t know what to do? Should I go to the party or stay home? My mom is upset, her aunt is dying. What should I do?”
I listen intensely for an answer but none comes. Go figure. I go back inside. Dinner is ready, hot dogs and fries. My parents are very preoccupied with my aunt. So I go downstairs to watch TV and eat my dinner.
“Martha” my mom yells from the top of the stairs.
“Yes” I respond.
“ Aunt Gert just died Martha.”
“ Oh mom I’m sorry, oh no.” What else does one say at the time? I stayed in the basement and listened to music while I heard hustle and bustle upstairs. I think about my prayer to God asking him what to do? I think that perhaps there is a God after all. Then there were the phone calls and the doorbell ringing. The priest arrives. My aunt and uncle from in town come over too.
“Martha I would like you to come upstairs now, Uncle Bill and Aunt Rae are here and we are going to give Gert the last rite. Fr. Lynng is here too to perform the service.”
“Ok mom” wiping the tears from my eyes. Aunt Gert and I had what you would call a kind of turbulent relationship. The first recollection of Gert for me is when I stuck my tongue out at her when I was about six. It must have been the year she moved in with us that I did that. I resented the fact that there was another person in the house taking away my moms precious time.
We stood around my Aunt’s bed while the priest performed the last rite. Family members kneeling on the floor praying, it was a very solemn ceremony. I had never seen a dead body before, it kind of left me awestruck. I didn’t get too close though. I was afraid Gert would sit up and start laughing at us all or something.
The ambulance arrived and my aunt was taken to the morgue.
I didn’t go to my party or the prom the year I graduated from high school. Yet that summer was the summer I remember things changed for all of us. With my aunt Gert passed on, my mother had more time to do what she wanted to do.
Now forty years later I look at her lying in the hospital bed. The wrinkles and lines on her face tell a thousand different stories. She is my mom; she is old now the cigarette long gone from between her two fingers, her lungs no longer sucking in smoke but so desperate now to suck in oxygen.
“Hello,” I say to my mother. Another crisis, pneumonia again.
“Hi “she says.
“Do you know who I am mom?”
“No “
“I’m your daughter. “ I have with me on this visit my daughter who is also about to graduate from high school. I think back to that May many, many years ago. My mom so young with her smokes and her Capri’s and feel a sense of loss and sadness.
“Mom, what are you doing here in the hospital? I ask her.
“I don’t know.” She replies
“Where are my mother and father?” She asks me.
“I don’t know mom, but I am sure they will be here soon.”
“Ok, good. Oh my neck hurts, oh my stomach hurts.” My mother complains, she is not weeping yet there is pain in her voice, in her cry for help. With each cry I try to offer some words that will comfort her. That it seems is all I can do for her.
“Where does it hurt mom? Do you need anything? Can I get you anything?”
“No.” she replies.
“You are a conundrum.” I tell my mother.
“I know, I sure am.” She replies.
“Remember when you used to tell me I was a conundrum, mom?”
“Yes, yes I do.”
“And now the tables are turned “I said and laughed but my mom just looked at me blankly.
Her body is twisted from sitting day after day year after year in a wheelchair. She hasn’t been upright in years. She can’t turn her head or straighten her legs. Yet her hands are still soft to the touch and so my daughter grabs one hand and I the other.
She is tied to the bed they have her in restraints. My daughter and I untie her so her hands are free. Immediately she tries to pull out her oxygen tube.
“Mom, you can’t take that out or I am going to have to tie your hands again. You need that so you can breathe.”
“Oh “says mom and then starts to go again for the tube.
“Mom, no you can’t do that.” My daughter and I grab her hands again and hold on tight. My mom then tries to rest but she is agitated, no wonder I think to myself I would be agitated too.
“Where’s my horse? My mom asks me. My daughter and I laugh.
“Out in the barn.” I tell her.
“Oh “my mother replies. Our conversations are not what they used to be. My mother and I spent many days discussing many things before she got sick.
“Did you get the cheese? She asked me. “That is for that guy named Mr. Broth”
“Ok” I tell her wondering what is going on in her brain. Wondering what and how these words have no meaning to me, but surely have huge meaning to my mother.
My daughter and I spend several hours with my mother. The hospital is a horrible place for anyone but it seems for the elderly it is even more horrific.
In my mind’s eye I see my mom again sitting in her favorite chair. Looking out the window, waiting as my aunt lay dying upstairs in her room.
Full circle, we are here again, I suppose we are all waiting to die. Some of us hopefully will be around a lot longer than others. My daughter is seventeen and her life is just beginning. I am now the one sitting in the chair, looking out the window.
It’s my daughter’s party, her prom. I hear the anxiety in her voice. “Is Grandma going to be alright mom? Are you alright mom? I tell her not to worry; that I am alright, that this is life.
“Mom, we are going to go now ok”. I say to her.
“Alright, tell my mother and father to come and get me.” She answers.
“I will mom, I love you” I tell her and so does my daughter.
“I love you too.” My mom replies. And we leave the room.
My Mom and Daughter and I
I think to myself that life is a riddle, a puzzle of sorts; a conundrum. Once long ago I was a riddle to my mother, now she has become a puzzle to me. Does my daughter worry that I too will become afflicted with Alzheimer’s? She tells me she will look after me even if I become a difficult puzzle to solve. I am grateful for that, as my mother I am sure is grateful that she has a family to look after her. I take my daughters hand as we walk back to the car both of us lost in thought.
Photo Credits
Photos by Martha Farley – All Rights Reserved
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